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Bruna Dantas Lobato
is an intern for The Millions. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, Ploughshares online, Music & Literature, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. She is currently the assistant fiction editor for Washington Square Review. She tweets at @bdantaslobato.

And then there was you: the Oxford English Dictionary is soliciting public help in tracking down “a mysterious, possibly pornographic, 19th-century book from which a number of its quotations are derived.”

Benjamin Anastas has bid goodbye to the Twitter Village, and he thinks more writers should do the same. “There is a longing built into our online lives that can lead us to healthy attachments with multiple partners, a kind of polyamory of the mind, but it can also encourage the furtive transmission of waxed-chest photos and cock-shots,” he writes. “These are extreme examples of the kind of lonely misfires that Twitter allows, but I felt the temptation to seek comfort from my Twitter feed often enough to realize that it was only a matter of time before I did something embarrassing.”

Congrats are in order for our own Edan Lepucki, who recently sold her second novel to Crown! Her new book, a “sly, sinister exploration of female relationships,” will come out in 2017. You could also read her and our own Bill Morris on writing their most recentnovels.

Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch performed a haunting interpretation of “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats, and the actor has also recently signed on to play Hamlet on the London stage in autumn 2014. This raises the question: is Cumberbatch the British James Franco?

Adding to a review by Pamela Erens for The Millions, Zoë Heller readsJanet Malcolm’sForty One False Starts for the New York Review of Books. Among other things, she concludes that the writer’s job, at least in Malcolm’s estimation, is “to vanquish mess.” (You could also read a review in The NationI wrote about a few weeks ago.)

Those of you who stopped watching The Simpsons thirteen years ago (and heard that the voice actress who plays Edna Krabappel sadlypassed away in October) should know that Ms. Krabappel is now married to Ned Flanders. In a run-down over at Splitsider, Bradford Evanscatalogues weird plot developments in the last decade-plus of the series. (h/t Slate)

It’s not a commonly held opinion, but Hilary Mantel thinks Henry VIII was a romantic. In a brief interview with Jamie Sharpe, the Wolf Hall author dispels the common view of the oft-married king as a philanderer. “He thought that he had to shape his life and shape his kingdom for each woman,” she says. “Men didn’t think that way in those days.” You could also read Damian Barr’sinterview with her at The Millions.